The Enemy of Christian Fellowship

And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself. – John 12:32

I tell you, wherever, in any and all denominations, men get their eyes clearly fixed upon the face of the sacrificial Lord, upon the uplifted Christ of God, they do most assuredly move and draw together, and these men, even at the present time, are living and working in co-operative service and in brotherly concord and peace. It is the man who strikes his spear and plants his standard in his own self-chosen and self-created centre, and who will not look beyond his formal creed, his rigid polity, and his fleshly succession; it is this man, wherever he may be found, who is the foe of human fellowship and Christian intimacy, and who retards the gracious oneness for which our Saviour lived and bled and died. When we get our eager eyes fixed upon the Lord, the Lord uplifted in superlative sacrifice, when we pierce through every secondary medium, and contemplate the primary glory, we shall move down the different radii of our Church relationships – Episcopalian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Friend – and we shall emerge in the fair light of the oneness of a common love, and in the full, sweet harmony of a common confession, “My Lord and my God!” “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.”

-John Henry Jowett, from the sermon: The Magnetism of the Uplifted Lord